Even the Future Has a Backlog
The blockers are never where you expect them. I've known this for years. I just didn't expect my first week at a new job to prove it quite so efficiently.
Last Monday, I started my onboarding at Gradial. I knew moving from the Enterprise Monolith that is Adobe to the bleeding edge startup of Gradial would be a big move. I was right, but not really in the ways I expected and in ways that felt hauntingly familiar to my years setting up Enterprise customers with new MarTech stacks.
I have been really impressed with how easy a lot of the Gradial onboarding has been. I had my W2 in and even my health care coverage picked out two weeks before my start date.
Then there are the hiccups. I forgot to bring my passport, which I'd used online to verify my identity---making me payable. I thought back to all those kickoff and discovery calls where I'd show up to raring to go, only to find that key stakeholders were a no-show and nobody was there to articulate the vision for us to begin work.
Suddenly, I *was* that customer's AEM---ready to be filled with content... but my DAM librarian was still trying to map the taxonomy.
In the meantime, I still got to spend that week being amazed by what Gradial can do in a demo environment and meeting the incredible people who have been building and delivering it. So sure, I need to submit a few more metaphorical Jira tickets to get my system fully operational and show my passport to HR. Hey, turns out even the future has a backlog.
Ryan Yepsen
Ryan writes about enterprise AI, customer reality, systems thinking, and the operating conditions that make meaningful execution either possible or painful.